Re-reading it today makes me wonder if I was too tough in calling Afghanistan a ‘quagmire.’ But honestly I don’t think that is an exaggeration anymore. Does anyone really believe we are winning there anymore? I find this as frustrating as anyone else; is there no way to ‘win’ (no, I don’t know what that means either) that wouldn’t keep us there for decades and cost more trillions we don’t have? I just don’t see it anymore, even though I supported the original invasion. Similarly this the most high-profile platform in which I state that I think Iraq 2 was an error. I supported that too until recently, but we killed so many people and disrupted so many lives, for such modest improvement in Iraqi governance, that I just can’t find a way to defend it anymore.
2. I also spoke about Libya on Pusan’s English language radio station, 90.5 FM. (Go here and click on no. 117, for September 5, 2011 show.) Those comments are based on theseblog posts. In the last two weeks, I still don’t understand why NATO is staying in Libya anymore. I argued both in print and on the radio that the only way to keep R2P as a legitimate humanitarian intervention doctrine is for the interveners to get out of the way as soon as they are no longer needed to prevent the massacres that brought about the intervention calls to begin with. If the interveners (in this case, NATO) stay in beyond necessity (as is clearly so in Libya now), then R2P increasingly becomes a gimmick for externally-imposed regime change. That casts the R2P debate back into the terms broached by the Iraq invasion – R2P will be read as human right imperialism, American empire, neocolonialism, etc. Please don’t do this!
Libya is an important opportunity to demonstrate the R2P is a limited, non-western intervention doctrine that can hold non-western support, because its based in human rights lessons learned in the Balkans, Rwanda, and Darfur. NATO needs to get out immediately to keep it that way. If we stay in there taking victory laps, Russia, China, and India will never go along with this again. GET OUT NOW.
On the editorial page of today’s Korea Times, a significant misprint of my writing occurred.
The editorial, “Implication of US Budget Deficit for Korean Security,” reads: “Although America should be globocop, America’s finances force the obvious question of whether it can.” It should have read: “Even if one believes America should be globocop, America’s finances force the obvious question of whether it can.” Due to this and other editorial issues, I have asked the editors to remove the electronic version and to print an erratum retraction tomorrow.
Readers interested in the original argument can refer to the original blog-post on which the op-ed was based – here.
Sorry for the misunderstanding. Thank you for visiting my website.
2 pm UPDATE: The editorial has since been republished in its correct form.
Yes, it’s ‘Red Dawn’ all over again, only yet more ridiculous
What blog from Korea on security issues would be complete without some discussion of Homefront, the new video game from THQ on a North Korean invasion of the United States. H/t to Koehler for catching this hysterical vid. Unfortunately THQ has not released the game Korea – why not? South Koreans are stridently anti-communist and terrified of the North. I can imagine this game selling truckloads here… Oh well.
The debate is heating up on this, so here is my contribution, limited albeit by my inability to get the game here.
1. The game is hyped as written by the writer ofRed Dawn, John Milius. Milius also co-wrote Apocalypse Now, which he originally intended to end with a massive race war in which Colonel Kurtz (Brando) was to have lines like ‘isn’t it great to be a white man in the jungle with a gun?’. (Don’t believe me? Go watch Hearts of Darkness, the documentary on the making of Apocalypse Now to see Milius and director Francis Ford Coppola discussing this, as well as Milius’ creepy Wehrmacht fetish. Coppola openly [thankfully!] rejects the notion of some macho white fascist ending.)
Milius is exactly the sort of rightie that IR types love loathe in public, but secretly we get a total laugh out of wack-job entertainment like this. This is what world politics looks like in the fetid mind of a cold warrior NRA member who reads too many histories of World War II, Hitler, and Waffen-SS. In Red Dawn, the USSR invades the US on the ground by crossing the Bering Strait (!), because you know how well developed Arctic sea lanes are for moving millions of soldiers and huge amounts of supplies. Further, the intense cold weather of Alaska and the Yukon, plus the heights of the Rocky Mountains, plus the minimal road-network and infrastructure of the Pacific Northwest are clearly no hindrance to a massive armored invasion. Hah! If that is not enough glorious paranoia for you, Cuba and Nicaragua invade the US from Mexico added by Hispanic illegal immigrants who acted as saboteurs. (Yes, it is that ridiculous.) Finally, the US rebels against Soviet occupation include the captain of the football team, whose gets his arms from friends who are NRA members, and the nerdy school president turns out to be a commie traitor. So, yes, that jock who used to bully you in high school was actually a patriot ready to defend America and football, while the dorks who did their homework were wimpy red sell-outs. Ah, the ideology, the wild delusions of right-wing paranoia, and closet admiration for the Wehrmacht. You gotta love it… if it weren’t so d— frightening. The film so completely captures 80s right-wing themes and paranoias, I know lots of IR professors who actually teach it.
2. I can only imagine the even more insane script for Homefront. Here is the official trailer:
Did you know that North Korea’s navy can sail across the Pacific to amphibiously assault the US? Me neither…
This is so thoroughly ridiculous, it hardly bears comment (just read Foster-Carter). I would only add two observations:
a. Movies and games like this tell the world the US is genuinely obsessed with war and militarism. Yes, it is just a game, but US film and videogame producers make lots of this sort of stuff that endlessly celebrates American power and a—kicking; just in the last few years:24, Transformers 1 & 2, Terminator 4, Call of Duty. You wonder why people think we are a nasty, militaristic empire, well this is a pretty obvious place to start. Even our pop culture is suffused with this sort of military posturing and machismo. Just this year we have a Red Dawn remake coming, the Marine Corps recruiting vid Battle: Los Angeles, and yet another Transformersepic. Yes, the world is dangerous; yes, we have to defend ourselves; I love explosions and aliens as much as any male movie viewer; and I guess this is the sort of entertainment we get after ten years of the war on terror; but Hollywood is practically an adjunct of the military-industrial complex. How about a more nuanced portrait of force?
b. It is very noticeable how so many of these films and games take place on US soil – terrorists infiltrators, foreign invasions, alien landings (don’t miss Chuck Norris’ uber-cheese Invasion USA). The reason should be pretty obvious – if the Americans are defending their home, then all the moral problems of the use of US force disappear and the heroes can be as vicious as they want without worrying about the moral consequences. All the real-world agonizing about how American force sometimes kills the innocent (however unintended) in foreign places where maybe we should not be (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya), falls away.
So the righties like Milius or Michael Bay who come up with this stuff can show Americans as heroes, even though they are mercilessly mowing down the bad guys. Want to execute Geneva Convention-certified POWs (Red Dawn)? Sure, it’s ok, because “we live here.” Want to blow the head-off a defeated, wounded enemy (Transformers 2)? No big deal; they’re ‘evil.’ What to perform a vivisection (!) on a wounded opponent (Battle: Los Angeles)? Sure; this isn’t Abu Ghraib (though did anyone else think that in watching B:LA?); these alien SOBs invaded America, so do whatever you want. There are no namby-pamby liberal college professors and NGO activists around to moan that we kill too many civilians, seek imperial domination, war for oil, blah, blah, blah. Instead the dialogue can recite macho, posturing cliches about never giving up, defending our homes, and a—-kicking victory. This is the no-holds-barred, no-moral-errors-admissable, American-wars-are-always-right image of US force that neo-cons and Fox News so desperately want to legitimate. Placing these events on US soil opens the door for behavior we should find grossly illegitimate – and do when we do it in far away places. But in an invasion, the American defenders occupy the (easy) moral high ground, and therefore we can reveal in militarism and killing without moral anxiety. It’s all so callous and grotesque as to be morally outrageous, and it panders to the worst ‘Jacksonian,’ US-force-as-conflict-resolver instinct in US democracy, but then we live in the Fox News, post-torture era.
Like all of you in the last few weeks, I have been glued to CNN regarding Egypt. It is pretty inspiring, and I can only hope that Mubarak leaves and something more genuinely liberal and democratic takes his places. Here are a few thoughts.
1. Regarding the video selected above, I did plan to post a good pic from Egypt, but you’ve seen that a lot already, so that would not have added much new value. This you probably haven’t seen though, and it is ‘important’ for the sheer insanity about US conservatives’ foreign policy concerns in the ME it reveals. Apparently the Egyptian revolution is an islamist plot that will turn the Mediterranean into an Islamic lake, allow Russia to control Northern Europe, and China to control India and Pakistan. Don’t believe me? Beck’s sweeping hand movements will explain all… h/t: Center for a New American Security.
2. This is one of those critical junctures when observers should to go on the record about what to do. If all this somehow goes wrong, everyone will blame Obama in 20/20 hindsight. That will inevitably be partisan and unfair, because the Obama administration is making decisions under huge uncertainty. Credibility requires one to go on record now, when information is limited and we all have to make our best guess.
That US conservatives are badly split signals this huge uncertainty. Absolute moral certainty is a central pose of the American right’s self-image (tax hikes are always bad, Iraq 2 was a good idea no matter what), so if even the Right – which IMO takes foreign policy more seriously than domestic-focused US liberals – is divided, that tells you just how confused everyone really is. For the neo-con take that this really is about democracy, try Gerecht (excellent); for the gloomy realism that we should hew to the Egyptian military, try Krauthammer (depressing, but also good). And for the downright bizarre conspiratorial stuff, watch the above vid.
So here’s my line: I’ll say that Krauthammer and the realists are wrong. The Iran parallel is inaccurate; this will not lead to a Muslim Brothers’ dictatorship. Further, the support of democracy is, in itself, an important value. Even if there was a serious risk of an islamist takeover, we should still pressure Mubarak to get out, nor support a military oligarchy (Krauthammer). Who wants to look back in 10 years and say we supported yet another authoritarian in one of the worst governed places on earth, that we didn’t take the chance to push for something better, even if it was risky? How awful and embarrassing for the US; what a betrayal of all those heroic people we’ve seen on TV. And if they want islamists in the government, well, it is ultimately their country. So long as it remains a democracy (the difference between Turkey’s islamists’ participation, and Hamas’ budding oligarchy), then we have to allow them to disagree with us as is their right. Risking fanatics in government is part of democracy (witness, ahem, Sarah Palin). If we believe in it for ourselves, then we must be true to it for them. So, no, this is not a result of George Bush’s foreign policy, but we should support it anyway.
3. Israel should not drive our policy toward Egypt. Has anyone else noticed how much of this discussion has gotten hijacked by the ‘what-will-happen-to-Israel’ externality? (Try here, here, here, here, and here.) This is embarrassing and almost sycophantic. You can’t blame the Arabs for disbelieving we’re an honest broker when the fate of 6 million people in a different country outweighs the 85 million of the country that is actually the center of the story. Really? Should the US point of origin for yet another Middle East event be Israel’s benefit? We are two separate countries, right? Maybe we should care about the Egyptians themselves, right? Israel does have the finest military in the region, nuclear weapons, and a take-no-prisoners lobby in the US Congress, right? Don’t misunderstand me. I realize that Israel’s security is important for the US and that it is the only democracy in the region (although that is increasingly under question). I want Israel to be secure too; I’ve traveled there 3 times and unconditionally support its right to exist. If it would help, usher them into NATO or the EU, or extend formal US deterrence guarantees, even nuclear. But it’s long-overdue time that we break the habit looking over our shoulder to Israel on ME issues, and it’s extremely immoral to support continued Egyptian authoritarianism on the (likely correct) premise that a democratic Egypt will push Israel harder. That sells out the admirable sacrifice of 85 million for 6 million who voted for an openly provocative right-wing government.
First, Chalmers Johnson has died. This happened in late November, but the Yeonpyeong shelling captured the attention of my blogging. But given how important he was to the study of East Asia in political science, this should be mentioned here. This is very sad for our field. Two years ago, when Samuel Huntington died, I felt the same way. These guys are what we all aspire to in political science. I can’t think of one thing I have written in my career that I would recommend over an article by someone like Johnson or Huntington. Every time I whine about Asian mercantilism, Johnson’s work is in the back of mind (as is Robert Wade’s). I read Johnson’s Asian political economy stuff in grad school, and I see it living in Asia all the time. That is what our field is supposed to produce – these sorts of durable, well-researched insights that make our world a little more understandable. Very nice, and a genuine loss. (This is why we have political science, by the way.)
To be sure, Johnson jumped the rails in the 2000s with Bush and the Iraq War. I read the Blowback trilogy after the Iraq invasion. The first one is the best, but by the time he gets to the last book and starts musing about a military takeover of the US, you’re wondering if this is the same guy who wrote path-breaking research on Asia. Johnson was in good company though. Lots of other good left-wing foreign policy writers were pushed over the edge by W also; Chomsky and Bacevich spring to mind. Read Michael Lind’s useful deconstruction of how the foreign policy left kinda lost its head over W. But still, I think this stuff is quite valuable. It is a useful check on US neo-con fantasies that unipolarity and American exceptionalism mean rules don’t apply as much to the US as to others. It is hard in retrospect to think the Bush presidency wasn’t a disaster for the US, and Johnson, corrected for overstatement, will tell you why on foreign policy. (For an example, of lefty criticism that maintained better perspective on the Bush years, try here.)
2. Living in Asia means I missed the full coverage of the Wikileaks flap. My sense generally is that they don’t tell us too much we didn’t already know. I think Carpenter gets it about right here, and Yadav gives an excellent IR take here. I would only add 2 things:
A. Occasional random revelations like this might actually serve a foreign policy purpose. They remind others in world politics that for all our diplomatic niceties, we can see right through them and know they are flim-flaming us. This brings a certain (inappropriate to be sure) pressure on these guys to get their act together. It is kinda nice to see the Russians reminded that we are under no illusions about Putin’s closet semi-dictatorship, or for the N Koreans to know that we are thinking about a world beyond their nasty, civilian-murdering slave state, or for Robert Mugabe to know that we basically think he’s bonkers. Secretary of State Clinton is absolutely correct that this stuff should not have been leaked, but didn’t anyone else find it refreshing to hear US diplomats speaking honestly and insightfully? Wasn’t it pleasing to hear US officials trenchantly blow off the world’s buffoons? I was pretty impressed actually at the quality of their off-the-cuff analyses, and pleased to see my tax payers dollars contributing to this work.
B. I worry about the long-term build-up of secrecy in the US government under the cloak of national security. Lefty writers like Johnson or Bacevich will even tell you we live in a National Security State now. A healthy democracy requires openness and transparency. Over time, stuff really should get declassified. It is the property, in the end, of the taxpayers and the voters, because it is our government. Assange himself seems to be drifting toward toward some bizarre hexagonal conspiracy theory stuff, but I am sympathetic to the general notion that the US is too secretive and that the presumptive prejudice in the US bureaucracy should be for declassification unless otherwise demonstrable and clear national security grounds can be established. An Economist blogger captures my concerns pretty well, and of course, the Bush administration, once again *sigh*, is responsible for much of the recent fear of secret government in the US. Greenwald, as usual, nails the hypocrisy of those defending spiralling classification.
3. This is unrelated, but if you haven’t read this description of the 30 worst pundits-turned-hacks in the US, you should. It is a great dissection of everything wrong with journalism masquerading as social science, too frequently in the service of ideology. It is left-biased, but so what. It is punchy, trenchant, humorous, and good warning to everyone with a blog (me too) to do you homework and not just recycle your prejudices. It illustrates one of the great benefits of the Internet – independent bloggers and others can fact check and hit back in real-time. It makes me worry that maybe I recycle stuff here…
I don’t know anything about the Chinese outfit that makes these, but it sure looks like the Chinese are getting a laugh out of our financial foolishness in the West. To be fair though, let them. They’ve earned their Schadenfreude, and we deserve the pain for our profligacy.
That’s our Christmas tree, the only one in our building…
It is the Christmas season, and I need a break from blogging. For my previous thoughts on Christmas in Korea, try here. But I certainly hope you have a nice holiday and be sure to watch Charlie Brown’s Christmas.
Next year, I will post my comments on my 2010 predictions. I did ok on them – about 50%. I will also list some new predictions and try tougher ones. My 2010 ones were a little tame and too easy.
I also want to expand my reach more beyond Korea and (less so) China. Inevitably, I seem to write on Korea a lot, because it is where I live and because of the US commitment here, as well as China just because it is so important. Next year, I am planning cooperation with the excellent Japan Security Watch to produce more stuff on Japan as well. Reader comments on the utility and direction of the blog are always welcome.
(For a bit of new content in passing, I think this article is worth pointing out to American readers. I continue to be impressed at the humanity of crime and punishment in Korea. Crime here is far less widespread and violent than in the US; Korea is wonderfully safe. And the criminal justice system and the police are more balanced and humane than the US flirtation with militarized policing and torture. Score one for the Koreans.)
So here is a little Korean-Asian humor for the winter break. Enjoy. WARNING: It includes vulgarity, but it is pretty hilarious.
Scheuer should stick to Al Qaeda and his Middle East expertise…
For the last week , I have read and watched a lot of the coverage. Most of it was pretty good, to my great surprise, although the international media were too, almost intentionally, alarmist, with little coverage of the fact that South Korean citizens all but ignored this and went on with their daily lives. I didn’t even know about the shelling until my classes had ended that day and a BBC reporter told me. South Koreans have become inured to these outbursts, because they happen so often. This life-went-on-normally story needs to compete with all the images of smoke from the island and the USS George Washington deployment. The Korean media noted this problem as well.
There was a clear tone difference between international media outlets like CNN, Reuters, SkyNews, Fox (above), and the NYT, and the local Korean media. Friends in the US emailed me after watching US news coverage, because they thought a war was imminent. (What are the networks telling you guys?) I get CCN International in my house, and the initial coverage was unhelpful too, with flashy graphics of ‘Breaking News!’ and its on-site reporters got a little carried away with the claim that Korea is close to all-out war. More generally, the tone seemed to be that this was one of the worst crises since the war. Really? You mean that? Do you see Koreans running around with their hair on fire? Didn’t everyone just stay to work that day and the next? Did they run civil defense drills? Did the KOSPI drop? Does Scheuer (above, whom I think is quite good on Middle East) really think we should sink the NK navy? Interviewing expat English teachers in Seoul whose mothers don’t know anything about Korea and are freaking out is not reporting. It was noticeable and disappointing that none of the foreign outlets hit the news conferences at the MND or MOFAT or Blue House, where an admirable restraint and seriousness prevailed. There is an obvious audience-expansion incentive to hyping the shelling (it’s World War III in Korea!), but the blowback problems created for policy-makers are serious and threaten a self-fulfilling prophecy: they don’t look ‘tough’ if they don’t hit back in a CNN-hyped crisis, so they hit back, thereby worsening that very crisis.
So please don’t portray the Yeonpyeong situation like the first step toward war in a wholly unique provocation. It was neither. NK does this stuff all the time; the NK elite doesn’t want a war because they will lose and all hang afterwards (this is why SK retains the death penalty which they almost never use at home anymore); NK frequently does these things for internal, intra-NK in-fighting reasons that have little to do with the rest of world; SK doesn’t want a war, because it doesn’t want its rich democracy nuked. So please, control the hype and hysteria. If it is both unwarranted and a bit dangerous, because it pushes SK’s elites toward macho, George-Bush-style decision-making so they don’t look ‘weak.’ Raising the temperature artificially to gain viewership is unethical and retards de-escalation.
Korea has ALWAYS been geopolitically tense in this manner. NK has regularly bullied SK; SK’s belligerent rhetoric has never been seriously followed-up; the US routinely steps in to back up its ally; there have been lots of these sorts of crises before, and many far worse: the tree-cutting incident (1976), the cabinet bombing (1983), the KAL bombing (1987), the Cheonan (2010), plus lots of little Yellow Sea skirmishes before (1999, 2002, 2009). NK is always saying they will bomb SK and turn Seoul into a sea of fire. So come on, wae-guk-sarams; put in some context, as if you are genuinely a qualified Korea expert and didn’t just fall off the plane from Tokyo or Hong Kong. For my previous thoughts on CNN, which broadly apply this time around, try here.
By contrast, I was struck by how good the Korean media was on this. I watched a lot of the KBS and SBS TV reports in the last week. They were very informative, full of interviews with government officials and academics, with lots of imagery and maps and such. They walked you through exactly where the NK rounds came from and which SK units returned fire, what the rules of engagement are, who might have been responsible in the KPA. They explained in detail about the in-theater US and Korean forces. So far as I have seen, none of this detail was presented in external media, although I tried. The context I mentioned above was fully presented, as most Koreans roughly know this history anyway. All sort of talking heads from universities and think tanks were rolled out to give lots of perspective and policy suggestions. There was no scary music or quick-cut graphics, although you can always read the Chosun Ilbo for your saber-rattling fix. Usually I am pretty tough on the Korean media on this site. Among other ills, they are endlessly jingoistic, fact-check even less than Dan Rather, are far too statist and deferent to elites, and tilt toward xenophobia on the English teachers here (underqualified, pot-smoking child molesters from Canada, they tell me). But this time they were measured, focused, and professional, maybe because of the gravity of the situation. Hear, hear.
So everyone should relax. If Glenn beck sounds off on the Rapture and North Korea, ignore him (in fact, ignore almost everything Beck, or worse, Palin on NK, says). If the neocon-industrial complex fires up on the necessity of NK regime change and starts claiming Obama is weak, don’t listen to them either. By Korean standards, this is not scarcely a crisis yet (you’d be amazed how blithe they are about these sorts of things), so let’s not raise the pressure on them for ratings or politics. This stuff is far more manageable than those early images of smoke rising from the island lead you to believe.
NB: if I sound to too sanguine, here is the threshold when you should indeed panic about Korea: when South Korea shoots back. Then you can run your Michael Bay war-time stories, because SK is super-vulnerable to NK. Hence if they still shoot back, they are taking a huge risk and that means the debate here really has shifted. To date, SK has never struck back militarily after one of these sorts of things (no airstrikes, port mining, etc). So that is the real benchmark for ‘Krisis in Korea on Fox!’
NB2 for US readers in Korea: in event of a war, the embassy plan is for us all to head for Pusan and then be flown/shipped to Japan. You can bring your Korean spouse too, but not her family (so I won’t be going ). You will be notified via the embassy’s email registration system. Sign up here if you haven’t already. No joke on this info, btw.
This is great, yet another clever inside joke for the field. Here a few thoughts:
1. This is yet more evidence that IR needs some kind of serious treatment of alternative media presentations of what we do. Movies, video games, and now videos like this or the Chinese professor ad, all bolster my growing belief that we are missing something by not seriously examining media and IR. Reading – what IR-types do all day, cause its all we did in grad school – is obviously competing with lots of other sources of information in our digital age. Anyone who has taught undergrads for more than a few months knows that they don’t like doing the reading, but they love digital media. In the same way we now teach more and more IR film courses, we more generally need to adapt our pedagogy to the multifarious ways our students absorb information. NB: This is not an argument to dumb-down the field with video; it is a pedagogical concern. IR grad programs will still be the chilling, totalist, never-exercise, read-all-day, live-on-cigarettes-and-microwavable-food boot camp for you brain.
2. I am impressed how much knowledge of detail the authors of the video assume. Insofar as this is meant for a general audience, that reflects a fair amount of economic literacy in your average Joe viewer. Consider all this insider jargon: ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics,’ DoT Secretary Geithner is only referred to as ‘Timmy G,’ ‘reserve currency,’ ‘currency manipulator,’ the list of Chinese premiers, the joke that GM means ‘government motors,’ Argentina’s 2002 default/meltdown, ‘buyer of last resort,’ ‘dollar denomination.’ That is a nice compliment to how much about econ the general public has learned since the Great Recession broke.
3. Great jokes: Uncle Sam dances and fires a machine gun in the air as Obama wears ‘USA No. 1’ bling. Somehow they managed to build a rhyme with ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics.’ Did anyone else notice that the Chinese panda looked like Panda from Tekken? Obama’s dog died from lead in the Chinese dog food, complete with a green cloud around the dog. Adding the macarena dance from the 1990s was superb. I am embarrassed to admit that I thought the macarena was pretty cool dances moves back in the 1990s golden age…
A few months ago, after endless referrals by my students that it was ‘totally awesome’ and ‘the real war on terrorism,’ I finally played the controversial Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. While much of it is entertaining to be sure, it is also disturbingly realistic and sadistic. In fact, parts of it aren’t really ‘enjoyable’ at all, particularly the notorious airport massacre, where they expect you to mow down (yes, mow) civilians as a terrorist. (What psycho put that sequence in?) At the time, I said we really need a serious treatment of video games in IR. (I admit to being a fan of the Halo series, but in part because the aliens are silly non-human targets, so the ethical questions raised by ‘playing’ Modern Warfare are muted.)
Here we are again. I haven’t played this game, but who are these guys at Activision that come up with this stuff? A hat-tip here must go to Jon Westen for sheer stupefaction on this. There is so much wrong here, yet it is so obviously campy, I don’t know what to think. The best part has to be 0.14, with the smiling, chunky pre-teen blowing down the door for an Iraq-style house-to-house sweep. I know we are supposed to laugh (one can’t help it; check 0.44 when the fat guy falls over from the RPG back-blast), but isn’t it supremely immoral to laugh at realistically portrayed combat, especially when the military of the game’s target audience is involved in exactly this sort of urban combat? (The commercial is clearly modeled on Black Hawk Down.) I asked a similar question once before: is it moral to laugh at North Korea?
This raises a million good questions for a dissertation, although an interdisciplinary one, because the writer needs training in both communications and ethics to really get a handle on these issues. Here are just a few thoughts:
1. Without advocating censorship, is it ethically proper to take entertainment pleasure from direct, first-person involvement in realistic war scenarios? This strikes me as different from watching a war film that is realistic. No one would say that Saving Private Ryan or Platoon are enjoyable in the same way that these sorts of games are intended to be. The former are exposes that are tragic, and learning experiences for the audience on the horror of violence while nonetheless recognizing the moral necessity of force sometimes. In that sense they are good, and I recommend them in class. By contrast, games like this entertain through adrenaline rush: war is exciting not tragic, in the vein of the film 300 or Starship Troopers.
2. In defense of the games, the literature on battlefield stress does in fact identify the thrill of combat as one possible reaction. This theme was (badly) explored in the Hurt Lockerlast year. And in the far better Generation Kill, this is a topic of regular conversation among the soldiers, and the colonel in the last episode openly admits that he enjoyed the combat. (Patton said the same thing, that ‘war is hell,’ but he ‘would miss it so.’) And I imagine that in a dim way, that is what the game makers had in mind above when they made this commercial, particularly when they show the ‘combatants’ smiling as they blow stuff up. So we are all tempted by the thrill of killing? But aren’t these the sorts of Freudian, primordial, bloodlust instincts we want to tamp down? I think that is the ultimate moral problem of the commercial. War is supposed to be something awful and tragic; isn’t it political incorrect to show it as a kick-a– high like Hurt Locker or Ernst Juenger suggested? But if it really is that kind of high, are the Activision game designers just showing us our true nature? Tough…
Whoever writes this dissertation/book faces the obvious credibility problem that the field might laugh at it. That is an unfortunate by-product of IR’s stubborn determination to be as irrelevant as possible. But here are a couple possible tropes:
1. Our students, and many others, play these games a lot more than they read the world politics textbooks we assign them. They function, however badly, to communicate information about international relations to the public, and ignoring that out of professional hauteur is just arrogance. This is one reason why ‘IR and film’ courses have taken off in the last decade or so: so many people watch them. So the gap in literature, however silly it might initially appear, is there.
2. A distinction can be drawn between strategy games and first-person shooters (FPS). In grad school, I knew lots of fellow students who enjoyed the Civilization video game series, and just about anyone with an interest in history played Risk or Axis and Allies as a kid. (Risk taught me where Kamchatka was when I was 11.) These sorts of games focus on cost-benefit analyses, resource mobilization, probability estimations, etc. – i.e., game theory. The blood and death of war disappears behind primitive plastic representations, and the challenge is really bureaucratic not adrenal. By contrast, the ‘fun’ of the FPS is precisely the bloodbath, which is why they sell so much better and provoke so much more discussion.
3. The moral discomfort lies in the evolution of games from identifiably unreal entertainment into real-life simulations. Barnett makes the astute observation that unmanned drones used in combat are miniaturizing in such a way that they increasingly resemble the model planes people can build in their backyards. Gaming is similarly blurring these sorts of lines. I recall reading that race car drivers were practicing on the Gran Turismo video game, as were pilots on Microsoft’s Flight Simulator game. When I visited Ft. Jackson, SC once on an educator’s tour, they showed us how FPS video game technology was adapted for training simulations, and, of course, the Army has come in for all kinds of criticism with its America’s Army game, which, its detractors claim, is a shameless recruitment tool that militarizes high school. My point is that the more video games are like virtual reality, rather than a playful pause or break from reality, the more criticism will grow of disturbing content. It is the simulation of reality, not the violence itself, that so worries people (that is why Halo-style alien-invasion games are never so controversial).
So if you are a closet video junky, here is your excuse to intellectualize your couch-potato-ness. It could be a very interesting book.
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Robert E Kelly 